All our donators usually play during prime time, so it is quite difficult to join it's true. And the way the reserved slots system work (without completely closing 2 slots for donators -- and even then, that has its own issues), auto-join doesn't work well (again, during prime time).

I recommend trying to register for a Verified Membership, as the system tries to avoid kicking VMs first when donators join a full server. It doesn't mean auto-join will let you join during prime time, but it could help.VM info: http://hyperiongaming.org/index.php?topic=493.0

Yea, sorry about the awful Captcha, the good news is that you dont have to worry about them after 2 posts, so you're safe now

Unfortunately, we get hit pretty frequently by a lot of spam bots, and they're "smart" enough to pass a lot of the images included in SMF (the forum software we're using). I don't plan on using a newer forum software, so these CAPTCHA are the only spam defense we've got.

As for the question which requires STEAM as the answer, thank you, there was a mistake, which I corrected. It should now be working properly.

A lot of servers use bots when they're empty, this isn't new. That said, I'm personally not a fan of them, but it doesn't hurt to try for a while and see if they actually decrease traffic.

Now the reason bots were added was because a lot of people are bored trying to fill the server. As you mentioned, I don't play TF2 anymore, so I'm not one of these people that have to wait sometimes for an hour to get the server started. And it's usually the same people every day that help getting things started. I've idled on "my" server for probably weeks all counted together, and it was really boring. And it was easier too back then, since Valve has made a lot of changes against community servers these past 2 years.--Overall, thank you for your feedback, bots will remain for a bit longer until I get more data.

Unfortunately mixing game modes doesn't work very well. It might be fine if we had a larger community. I don't mind trying to merge game modes on the 2nd server, but I doubt the issue is maps/modes; it just is very difficult to start a new server for TF2 these days.

I'll be going over these lag spikes with our server host this week. I haven't made any changes lately, besides adding a couple new custom maps. I haven't seen any performance drops when looking at my logs, but it doesn't necessarily mean anything.